"Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father's gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway. Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, almost filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. 'Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain't drawn my pistol and don't want to.' Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff with his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So did the others, four on horseback and two on the seat of an old buckboard with 'Hines Mortuary' printed on the side in faded yellow letters."

In Cymbeline, director Michael Almereyda, working with cinematographer Tim Orr, strikingly calls attention to the flimsiness of the story's settings. Characters hatch out a plan at a Chinese restaurant and the audience is allowed to ineffably sense that this location was selected, perhaps the week before shooting, for the strip-mall bareness of its interior and for its overall chintziness, which contrasts with the heightened poetic dialogue that's taken from Shakespeare's play of the same name. Other locations, which include warehouses, dilapidated mansions, bridges, and spartanly furnished cabins, exude a similarly purposefully contrived aura of isolated, cherry-picked formality: They're theatrical sets as found objects, and Orr often casts them in silvery hues that convey a nihilistic impression of decay and apocalyptic impermanency.

"Remember" opens with Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his group hesitantly heading into the Alexandria Safe-Zone, a heavily fortified suburban community run by Deanna Monroe (Tovah Feldshuh), a former congresswoman. The title of the episode is significant in that it reflects the caution felt by The Walking Dead's heroes in trying to adapt to life before the biters, and, of course, Woodbury. And much of the storyline teases two opposing possibilities of what Alexandria could come to be for the group, only to then introduce a third and far more chilling route in the episode's final seconds.

"This was no coy actor's pose, though. Trekkers who met the actor will tell you that while he could be prickly about the character early on, Nimoy was always respectful of their love for Spock, because he realized how much he'd meant to them, and to him, over the—how they appreciated him and identified with him because of Nimoy's lovingly detailed, obviously personal performance, which in some small way helped illuminate whatever struggles they were going through. Nimoy's attitude toward Spock warmed over time, eventually becoming something close to an unabashed embrace. While I never had the chance to interview him at length, I did speak to him briefly at a Los Angeles screening about 15 years ago, and he didn't scowl or flinch or otherwise recoil from my fanboyish eagerness to discuss the character. I asked, 'Do you ever feel that in some ways the character was as much a curse as a blessing?' He said simply, 'All actors should be so cursed.'"

Though Looking is a series rightly known for its rather frank discussions and depictions of sex, it's also finely attuned to the rhythms of friendship—the type of affection at the center of "Looking for a Plot." The focused three-hander, which finds Patrick (Jonathan Groff), Dom (Murray Bartlett), and Doris (Lauren Weedman) in Modesto for her father's funeral, lends new meaning to Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine," piped onto the empty, glittering dance floor of a Modesto gay bar known as the Brave Bull. "I used to think maybe you loved me," we hear, as the main trio lets loose the night before the burial. "Now, baby, I'm sure."

"Ask Me My Name" traces the course of a single night that spirals unpredictably out of control. The episode opens with a brief prelude to the evening that presents Hannah (Lena Dunham) in a position of newfound stability: She's landed a job as a substitute teacher and displays surprising confidence in the classroom. Following a lesson on Oedipus Rex (the inspiration, she informs her students, "for the whole concept of the MILF"), she has a meet-cute in the teachers' lounge with fellow teacher Fran (Jake Lacy). They flirt, he asks her out, and the show's title card appears on screen accompanied by a burst of exultant melody. Both professionally and romantically, Hannah seems primed to flourish.

"I work so hard, and out of the raw material that is the script and talks I have with the director, the writer, I create, I hope, a very specific person who wouldn't have otherwise existed. However, do I then attach and hang on to the finished product? No. The experience of the creation of the character is what feeds me, what excites me, challenges me. I just finished this movie with J.A. Bayona, called A Monster Calls [co-starring Liam Neeson and Felicity Jones, expected in 2016], which was a challenging movie for all of us. It's from a novel written by Patrick Ness. But, after the experience, I let it go, because I know the director's going to go in; the alchemist will take over and do something else with it."

Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako follows ex-cop Akikazu Fujishima (Kōji Yakusho) as he bludgeons and growls his way through the grade schools, shopping malls, drug dens, and criminal underworld of Tokyo in search of his estranged teenage daughter, Kanako (Nana Komatsu). Divorced and unemployed, his mind addled from abusing prescription drugs, Akikazu has zero investment in his world. When his ex-wife (Asuka Kurosawa) tells him of their daughter's disappearance, Akikazu uses the event as a pretense to go on a violent rampage, insulting and assaulting everyone he comes across in a journey that quickly reveals itself to be less about finding his progeny than about getting revenge against the world for all of the perceived injustices that he's ever suffered. Angry, sweaty, and disheveled from the start, he never bothers to change his one increasingly bloodstained suit, though this doesn't prevent him from entering schools and shopping malls to physically and verbally abuse schoolgirls and their female teachers.

Voice Over sketches a portrait of an upper-middle-class family in Chile, flitting from one highly charged plot point to the next (a birth, a funeral, an illicit affair, the dissolution of a marriage) without probing too deeply into any of the characters or feelings involved. That can make it feel a bit like an upscale soap opera, as beautiful sisters Sofia (Ingrid Isensee) and Ana (María José Siebald), their flawless skin generally lit to a caramel glow, speculate in upscale settings about other members of their family, with an occasional break to have sex (Sofia with an inappropropriate boyfriend; Ana with a blandly supportive husband) or take care of their children.

"I knew that we were pushing some big buttons, but I sort of underestimated the influence and bigotry of fundamentalist religion and racism in this country and the world. I always think that, if my work is successful, it goes beyond my intentions and in this case it definitely did. The most important thing was to force people to reimagine their visual references and really root out their prejudices. Using burning crosses to reference racism to religion. Why not a Black Jesus? Why can't you imagine kissing him? I wanted to speak about ecstasy and to show the relationship between sexual and religious ecstasy. I think that subconsciously a lot of people understood this and were either enthralled or outraged by it. Consciously, I don't think a lot of the audience would have made this interpretation."